Tradition-relative normative authority
Canonical authority
Asks how a community receives and uses a text.
Valid claim: This text functions as authoritative for this community and purpose.
Bounded method comparison
Canonical authority and historical evidence
What changes when one statement is evaluated as sacred authority and as a historical claim?
Public evidentiary argument
Historical evidence
Asks what surviving traces warrant about the past.
Valid claim: These sources support this bounded historical conclusion with stated uncertainty.
Shared comparison axes
- Source identity
- Date and context
- Claim scope
Non-equivalences to preserve
- Normative authority is not source proximity.
- Historical uncertainty does not erase sacred use.
Comparison procedure
- 1.Write the proposition once.
- 2.Evaluate it separately under each authority regime.
- 3.Publish both conclusions without merging their confidence scales.
Prohibited inference
A text’s sacred authority neither proves nor disproves its empirical and historical propositions.
Connected concepts and sources
- Teacher’s Guides and Primary Source Analysis Tool · Library of Congress
- TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange · Text Encoding Initiative Consortium